Schwartzlist columns

The Francesco Datini Institute in Prato holds a highly distinguished yearly conference (Settimana di studi) on economics and its history. The range of subjects is impressive and inspiring, from “Wool as a raw material” in 1969 to “Water management in Europe, twelfth to eighteenth centuries” in 2017. In 2001 the theme was “Economics and art,” with more than fifty European and American participants. My contribution was a comparison of the patronage networks in three major seventeenth-century art centers. I suggested that certain structural similarities reveal themselves that may point to deep-lying social forces.

The proceedings were published in 2002 in a form that is not easy to scan well. Now that I have tried, fifteen years later, I see that the results are legible enough. An invaluable feature of Datini proceedings is that they include the discussions following each block of papers. Click here for a column on the congress.

To exaggerate a bit: Economists equate the value of art with its cash price; to art historians the very thought is anathema. Economists and economic historians study open, anonymous markets; art historians closed, personal studios. The former deal in abstractions and numbers; the latter in objects and judgments. Students of economics are looking for universal laws; those of art for unique properties and fine distinctions.

No wonder then that when practitioners of these disciplines get together they find it hard to get in gear. In fact, few of them even get together at all. Only a handful of economic historians have ever concerned themselves with a field as small as art; not many art historians have studied as crass an aspect of art history as the art market. A true meeting of the economic and art-historical minds has yet to take place, an economic history of art yet to be written. For the moment, cooperation between the disciplines takes place mainly at special congresses, most recently a meeting held in Prato, Italy at the Francesco Datini Institute for Economic History on 30 April-4 May: Economy and Art, 13th-18th centuries.

An example of how shocking the economic study of art can be was delivered by Pierre Gérin-Jean of Paris. Studying the prices of art and other precious objects, he writes perfectly sensibly that price tells us something about the behavior of artists and buyers and that it offers an objective basis for cross-cultural and transhistorical comparisons. This should allow the art historian, he writes, “to take account of past realities that may be very different from our own.” His findings are however so different from the present-day scale of values that it’s hard even to begin to take them into account. Analyzing 3,500 prices over the centuries, Gérin-Jean found that the present-day primacy of paintings on the art market throws all historical comparisons out of balance. The rate of pay for painters lay considerably below that for professions we now consider artisanal, such as jewelers, metalsmiths, embroiderers and weavers. The Last Judgment by Michelangelo, which many would call the greatest work of art ever made, cost Pope Paul III only half the amount that as Cardinal Alessandro Farnese he had paid for a crucifix and two chandeliers in rock crystal and lapis lazuli. No one today, in an age when a painting by (in Gérin-Jean’s example) Willem de Kooning is worth more than any piece of jewelry in existence, is capable of squinting hard enough at the objects involved to begin to make sense of these relationships.

Sense can and must be be made of another of the economic-historical papers at the conference, by the Milanese historian Guido Guerzoni. Guerzoni has entered into a database all the expenditures of the Este court in Ferrara over long stretches of the 15th and 16th centuries. What he discovered undermines the prevailing view of court patronage as a propagandistic means of glorifying the dynasty. Guerzoni’s figures show that disbursements on representational art were dwarfed both in volume and rate of pay by spending on furniture and tapestries, music and dance, clothing and jewels, stucco and clocks. It goes against all the evidence to place the minor and poorly paid expenditures on painting at the center of Este patronage. Instead, he suggests that we view it as a mainly social and economic phenomenon, a driving force in the life of a city of which the courts constituted a major portion of the populace. In political terms, patronage was more of an instrument for preserving consensus than elevating the Este above their dependents.

If economic history challenges the assumptions of art history, the converse can also be maintained. In paper after paper, humanistically inclined historians insisted that the economists’ reliance on the market model is excessive and ahistorical. John Brewer (a Brit in Chicago) pointed out that there is such a thing as a system of the arts, based on quality connoisseurship, that deliberately sets itself off against the market but which is nonetheless indispensible for determining artistic values. Wim Blockmans (A Fleming in Leiden) complained that the market model left no room for symbolic values that can at times be of greater importance for the parties involved than financial worth. Laurence Fontaine (a Frenchwoman in Florence) argued for a breaking down of the economy of art into a world of economies, corresponding to the multiple worlds of art that we encounter in the historical record. Maximiliaan Martens (a Fleming in Groningen) objected to the too-loose application of the concepts mass market and serial production to art of the 15th and 16th centuries.

For the moment, however, the market model seems to be even more unbudgably entrenched in the study of economics than is the hegemony of painting in the study of art. Art historians need heavier ammunition than they have at present before they can convince economists that their faith in market forces as an explanatory tool goes too far. To acknowledge this, economists would have to adjust not only their analyses of value in past ages but also of the present, admitting a larger range of qualitative factors than economists care to deal with.

My sense of the congress was that both sides were edging towards a conception of the market in art in which the roles of more stakeholders were being considered than those of the artist and patron – the art-historical instinct – or the buyer and seller, as economists do. The market in artistic prices and aesthetic values alike is strongly influenced by connoisseurs and other kibitzers. Museumgoers who would never be able to buy an expensive painting nonetheless help determine the relative value of old masters in the market. When their feelings, as well as those of other players in the art system, are factored into the equation, more art-historical and economic gears may start to mesh.

Our visit to Italy started the evening before we left, with a performance by the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, directed by Pierre Audi, conducted by Christophe Rousset. It was one of the most wonderful evenings of my life. Few musicians can ever have been so inspired as Monteverdi in the writing of the opera and few librettos as gripping as that of Giovanni Francesco Busenello. The operations of fate that opera thrives on and that come across so histrionically in most 19th-century operas, are presented here as an amoral and overpowering triumph of sensual desire over all else. The opera was staged with melancholy dignity, in costumes reminiscent of drawings of Renaissance masque, and sung with heartbreaking beauty. One of the features of the Netherlands Opera that make it so appealing to me is the absence of the prima donna cult. Individual voices do not claim special attention and the audience seldom applauds arias. Perhaps it’s only because the Netherlands Opera cannot afford Cecilia Bartoli or Michael Chance, who have passionate claques, but whatever it is I’m for it. (From the Cecilia Bartoli – I adore her too, but still – HyperNews website I just culled the following):

My appeal for help in finding rooms in Rome and Florence was answered generously by quite a few of you. All responses have gone into my Travel tips folder, where I hope to make use of them later. I did call some of the places you recommended, but this proved fruitless. All the lodgings that were anyone’s favorite were already booked in that period, which was full of national holidays and such. In Rome we ended up staying for three nights at a b&b on the Piazza del Monte di Pietà. A wonderful location and a picturesque building, but at a price per night (for minimal accommodations and a breakfast consisting of two slices of bread, measured amounts of butter and jam and a two-cup pot of coffee) of 280,000 lire ($126), about the same that our children pay per month for student rooms in Amsterdam. And to think that the Monte di Pietà, the city pawnbroker, was established to combat usury. Even for that price we couldn’t find a room for the fourth night, which was the eve of a national holiday, so we had to move to an even more expensive hotel. In Florence we gave up after five phone calls, and simply stayed on in Prato at the hotel where the congress was putting me up. The decision was all the easier after our one afternoon and evening in Florence, which was so absurdly overcrowded – waiting in line in the rain to pay 5,000 lire to visit Santa Maria Novella, teenage mob scenes everywhere – that we didn’t go back. Instead, we had a much nicer time visiting Pistoia and the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano.

That was after the Datini symposium, an exhausting five-day affair that I drained to the dregs. Why is it that I can never seem to find time to sit down and read a scholarly journal, but manage to listen to I don’t know how many lectures at congresses and symposia, which take so much more time? The atmosphere at the congress, despite the built-in tensions sketched above, was notably gentlemanly. At least, in the (pretty awful) meeting hall. The confrontations and backstabbing were reserved for the corridors and cafés, as well as (I am told) the closed meetings of the scientific committee and the giunta. With more words at my disposal, I would have quoted the main organizer of the congress, Hans Pohl, who accosted me at the coffee bar with the provocation “Art is a commodity just like fish, no? Why can’t I find any art historians who are willing to discuss it with us on those terms?” Nonetheless, I was pleased that he liked my paper and singled it out at the wrap-up as the only talk aside from the keynote addresses that created a larger framework for the issues involved. (Any of you who wish to receive the text and tables of “The structure of patronage networks in Rome, The Hague and Amsterdam in the 17th century” may have it for the asking, in the hope that you will comment on it. I can still make use of suggestions for the published version.) [14 August 2017: this offer is now rescinded on account of redundancy.]

Some Italian experiences that stand out:

Visiting the Giustiniani exhibition at the Roman palace of the same name together with Irene Baldriga, the discoverer of the Bassano Michelangelo from the Giustiniani collection. The Christ with the Cross was the first display, on the stairway landing leading up to the exhibition galleries. Loekie and I studied it with her, after having looked closely the day before at the later version in the church of S. Maria sopra Minerva. (See FFDys 124: Lost and found.) Neither of us has any doubt whatsoever that Baldriga is right and that her professor missed out on the chance of a lifetime when she failed to identify the original author in her study of the Giustiniani collection. Dr. Squarzina, the main curator of the exhibition, is parading before the Italian media as the one who gave the statue to Michelangelo, but in the record of scholarship the find stands squarely to the credit of Baldriga.

Having dinner with Loekie on our 33rd wedding anniversary at the apartment of friends in Rome, who at my request had bought 33 long-stemmed red roses for her, which barely fit into our b&b. He is a Knight of Malta, which nowadays mainly entails providing paramedical services for pilgrims. He told us that during the Holy Year 2000 they helped about 15,000 visitors to Rome who fainted from exhaustion, emotion and heat.

Dinner at a roadside village restaurant near Poggio a Caiano with Bert Meijer, director of the Netherlands Institute in Florence.

Two lunches in Prato (La cucina di Paola, OK but overrated, and a forgettable tavola calda) with John Brewer, my fellow dedicatee of Simon Schama’s book Rembrandt’s eyes. We toasted Simon and talked about him lovingly, admiringly, jealously and critically.

Dinner in Florence (delightful neighborhood restaurant of S. Niccolo) with our old friend from publishing Alessandra Marchi of Centro Di. She also happens to be a Pandolfini princess, so we could enjoy some family gossip of a kind we never get to hear otherwise.

A visit by bus to Carmignano to see Pontormo’s Visitation and Bill Viola’s video installation The visit in a chapel of the same church (S. Michele).

Our first visit to Pistoia, capped by a personal tour of the empty S. Maria dell’Umilta by Father Massimo, who sang with us under Vasari’s dome to show us how long sound echos there (6-7 seconds) and regaled us with the local explanations of various iconographies, formal features and techniques in that wonderful church by Giuliano da Sangallo. (His S. Maria della Carceri in Prato was another highpoint.)

I was a bit out of it on the trip. I read clean over information on two events that I would have liked to attend. May 1st is one of the four days per year when the Virgin’s Sash, the famous Cintola, is shown at the Duomo of Prato. The organizers of the Datini conference didn’t announce this, because they wanted to keep their audience beyond 6 p.m., when the display took place. I also failed to notice in the guide to events in Prato that on the very day I visited Carmignano, a few hours earlier, Bill Viola was present at S. Michele. We met in Amsterdam three years ago and I would have liked to see him in the quieter Prato.

Finally, I convinced myself in Florence that I did not yet have a copy of the TCI guide to Firenze e Provincia, so I bought one. When I got home I of course found the same edition – the most recent one, of 1993 – on my bookshelves. I paid 90,000 lire; if any of you would like to take it off my hands it’s yours for 60,000 plus postage. [This offer too can no longer be fulfilled, as I now have only one copy on my bookshelves.]

To mark Rembrandt’s upcoming birthday, Schwartz reminisces about his beginnings in Rembrandt studies half a century ago.

My baptism of fire in Rembrandt studies took place fifty years ago under special circumstances. In spring 1967 I had been living in the Netherlands for a year-and-a-half. The Kress fellowship that had supported me in better style than to which I had been accustomed at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore having lapsed, I was eking out a meagre living, with support from my wife-to-be Loekie, as the English-language secretary to Prof. J.G. van Gelder (1903-80) of Utrecht University. From 1961 on I had built up valuable experience as a researcher and copy editor with the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Art and the Bollingen Foundation, capabilities that I thought would appeal to Dutch publishers of scholarly art history in English. I was wrong. They were used to sending translator’s copy to the printer and saw no need to add to the costs of that streamlined process. Then van Gelder offered to recommend me to the publishers of his own books, and I became a beneficiary of a powerful Dutch old boys network that was otherwise unavailable to an immigrant.

That one of van Gelder’s publishers indeed could make use of my services was however sheer happenstance. My letter to the director of J.M. Meulenhoff, Willem Bloemena, reached him upon his return from a phenomenally lucrative sales trip to New York. (See Willem Bloemena’s Great Rembrandt Book.) Emulating Mondadori’s success in bagging mega-orders for oversized books on Leonardo and Michelangelo, he had managed to sell a large edition of an equally big book on Rembrandt’s paintings to the publisher Eugene Reynal, who passed on some sixty thousand copies to Book-of-the-Month Club. The books had to be delivered in September 1968, in time to serve as BOMC’s crown title for the final quarter of 1968, on the eve of the 300th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death in 1969.

On the plane back home, halfway through a bottle of celebratory champagne, Bloemena began to reflect on what he had just sold. All he had at that point was an agreement with the Dutch-German art historian Horst Gerson (1907-78) to write – in German – a text of a certain length on Rembrandt’s paintings, supplemented by a catalogue of all the paintings Gerson regarded as “autograph.” In fifteen months he had to deliver full-length, high-quality printed books in English. The contract he had signed contained penalties for missing delivery or for coming up with shoddy goods that made capital punishment, which is quickly over and done with, look good.

That was his foremost concern when he opened an envelope with a job application from a young American art historian with editing experience. He hired me – first for half of what I should have been earning, a situation I remedied as soon as I realized what was going on – to do all the rest. The first and most enjoyable responsibility was to perform research for Gerson, one of the nicest people I have ever known. He wrote away in Groningen, where he was professor of art history, sending me requests for supplemental research on points that needed clarification. The results had to be submitted in a particular format – on A6 (4 x 5) kattebelletjes to be slipped into his documentation boxes, with one kattebelletje per subject, even if it was the summary of a complete article. I conferred with Gerson frequently in Groningen and on one occasion in Rome, where he was leading a study trip.

While performing these scholarly tasks, I was also expected to find an English translator – I chose the redoutable Heinz Norden (1905-78) – and edit his work; acquire black-and-white photos of all 420 Rembrandt paintings; choose and order photos of the 168 supplementary illustrations in the book; accompany the Swiss photographer André Held on color photography campaigns to locations where no one spoke French, a duty that involved drinking too much of his superior home-made framboise; supervise the graphic design, the work of Frits Stoepman, and put together with him the double spreads; compose the captions and write accompanying remarks in the catalogue; help Bloemena with a coda he added at the end of the book, on Rembrandt’s Nachleben; lunch with Bloemena at the excellent restaurant on the ground floor of his new office at Prinsengracht 1111 (the restaurant was called the Quatre Canetons – look for the Dutch pun); copy edit and proofread the English edition; compile concordances linking Gerson numbers to those in the catalogues of Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Abraham Bredius and Kurt Bauch and vice versa; build a general index and an index of Rembrandt works; provide a listing of photographic acknowledgments; stand by for press control with the production manager Gert Lathouwers, who trusted me to know the exact shades of the eighty paintings reproduced in color; keep the project boss Henk van Hoorn convinced that I was going to get everything done on time; and coordinate, in London, the catalogue in the Meulenhoff publication with Gerson’s new edition for Phaidon Press of Abraham Bredius’s catalogue of Rembrandt paintings of 1935, for which he had served as Bredius’s assistant and editor. All of this with Loekie’s moral support, hands-on help and the laudable forebearance she shows me nearly always.

In addition to the English edition, a well-produced, well-received book that indeed made it to New York by fall 1968, Rembrandt paintings also came out in 1969 in Dutch, French and German. This was in the days of mechanical typewriters, hot metal typesetting and analog lithography, when the most advanced means of communication was the fax. I doubt whether this feat could be accomplished today with as small a team as Bloemena put together in 1967, leading to the further soul-searching question of what the gains of computerization amount to in the end. “Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being,” John Stuart Mill wrote in The Principles of Political Economy (1848), as I read in an article by Nathan Heller in the July 24, 2017 issue of The New Yorker. Is Mills still right?

Aside from its appeal as a book for the art lover, Rembrandt paintings caused quite a stir in the world of Rembrandt studies. In the 1930s Abraham Bredius had included 610 paintings in his Rembrandt catalogue, of which in 1966 Kurt Bauch still accepted 562. Gerson set the knife in this corpus, recognizing Rembrandt’s hand only in 380 paintings, to which he added another forty of whose status he was uncertain. Although he offered little argumentation for these judgments, they were taken seriously and largely accepted. It helped that they were in line with a new wave of connoisseurship represented by the Rembrandt Research Project, which was launched in the same year as Gerson’s book came out. The RRP proclaimed itself to be practicing a more scientific connoisseurship than the intuitive variety of Gerson, Bauch and Bredius.

My reservations concerning the Rembrandt Research Project date from the first time I heard what it was up to. At the launching party for Gerson’s book in the Rijksmuseum, Simon Levie, a member of the RRP, told me proudly that they were going to examine all 620 paintings in Bredius and conclude whether or not they were painted by Rembrandt. I winced and said “But that’s the wrong question.” What I meant, as I had sensed in my work for Gerson and later wrote again and again, is that our understanding of what constitutes a Rembrandt painting is too imprecise to allow for categorical attributions of that kind.

This is the way I was plunged, outside academia, into the midst of one of the liveliest art-historical discussions of the past half-century. My participation in the debates about Rembrandt and connoisseurship has not always been a pleasure. But my intense immersion into Rembrandt studies fifty years ago has rewarded me vastly as a scholar, publisher, columnist and lover of art and art history.

For the past few years I have been writing occasional reviews on Amazon of books that I like. The idea behind this is that I can place the reviews on my own responsibility and immediately, and that they do not have to be heavy-going scholarly critiques. Here are the titles and links:

With a family history in Poland and the encumbrance of the Holocaust, Schwartz cannot visit that country like a casual tourist. A professional congress brought him to Warsaw for four days, where his ignorance of his antecedents came back to oppress him. Personal, scholarly and professional feelings become crossed and confused.Continue reading “353 Back to/from Poland”

The sale of a painting by Govert Flinck for a higher price than some Rembrandts have fetched in recent years prompts a reflection on the ongoing (and never-ending) revision of our scale of values. Continue reading “352 Up the Rembrandt school!”

That strong emotions have irresistible power over us is undeniable. What can be denied, or ignored, is the all-pervasive influence of even low-grade emotion on society and its members. The Australian Research Council (ARC) is funding a project to investigate the effects of emotion on European life in the second millennium. Schwartz brings back a progress report on emotion in art. Continue reading “351 The emotional turn”

The essay argues that the Garden of Delights by Jheronimus Bosch is based on the first account of creation in the Bible. Genesis 1 speaks of the creation of man and woman simultaneously, both in the image of God. No prohibition is expressed against eating forbidden fruit; the first humans are not disobedient; there is no serpent to tempt them; they are not embarrassed by their nakedness; they are not expelled from Eden and cursed with a life of hard work and painful childbearing. This picture corresponds to the left panel of the Garden of Delights. The spectacular center panel shows what the world would have looked like had the Fall of Man not taken place, had mankind been free merely to “be fruitful and multiply.”

The hell panel is compared by the author to the 12th-century Vision of Tundale, a Dutch translation of which was published in Den Bosch in 1484. The point of both works is to frighten the reader or viewer into repenting from sin before it is too late. The message is not one of inevitable damnation, but of how to achieve salvation, as did Tundale.

The print room of the Rijksmuseum mounted magnificent exhibitions on two very different Dutch landscape artists, the portrayer of Brazil Frans Post and the traveler in his own imagination Hercules Segers. The juxtaposition brings Schwartz to compare them; he finds out that they both came to the same sorry end. Continue reading “349 The difference between Frans Post and Hercules Seghers”

On the 30th of September 1676 the Delft courts appointed Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek as curator to the insolvent estate of Catharina Bolnes, the widow of Johannes Vermeer. So great is the power of those two names that generations of art historians have interpreted the document as a sign of profound bonding between art and science. Schwartz, in the footsteps of Michael Montias, reveals the disenchanting truth.